Nothing will make sense to your American ears, and you will doubt everything that we do, but in the end, you will understand.

(SPOILERS) Maybe Denis Villeneuve ought to call on his first
language being French as an excuse for the script quality of his forays into
Hollywood. First there was the overheated, ridiculous revenge picture Prisoners, masquerading as a serious
exploration of the repercussions of child abduction, and now he’s taken a
repeat course, plunging into the world of shadowy CIA operations and Mexican
drug cartels, only to pull back and reveal that the movie didn’t really have important
matters on its mind at all. It was just about a cool guy taking out the
baddies. The acclaim both have received is slightly mystifying, although in Sicario’s case I’m at least partly along
for the ride. This is a superbly directed movie, with several strong
performances, and it’s only in the last third that the procedural aspect is
revealed as little more than a sop, disguising its decidedly pulpy intent.

I’d read comparisons to Traffic,
so I was lulled into thinking Sicario’s
early stages were a positive sign, its unwilling to nursemaid its audience and
over-explain its content; we share the confusion of the main protagonist. By
the end, I was wondering if this might be a case of obfuscation due to
embarrassment over how little of the plot really makes sense.

The only real point of reference to Traffic – apart from the drugs trade, obviously – seems to be the
entirely superfluous plotline in which Mexican cop Silvio (Maximiliano Hernández)
is awoken by his son each morning and asked to come out and play football. Yes,
I suppose it’s intended to illustrate how the drugs trade ruins lives and
destroys families, but the actual integration is entirely artificial, inserted
into a plot that, unlike Traffic, is
entirely focussed on those out to bring down the cartel boss. As such, it feels
flagrantly cynical, an attempt to persuade that it has the broader (awards-worthy?)
substance of Soderbergh’s film.

Sicario is actor
Taylor Sheridan’s first screenplay and, to give him credit, he appears to have
a good sense of rhythm and structure, offering surprises and twists throughout.
The problem is, those facilities aren’t necessarily in service of piece that is
internally coherent in the final analysis. Emily Blunt’s FBI SWAT team agent
Kate Mace is offered an observational role in a unit consisting of Department
of Defence flip-flops-wearing Matt Graver (Josh Brolin, revelling in the chance
to play a completely self-regarding arsehole) and a Delta Force unit, after
discovering an Arizona house filled with walled-up corpses. Having lost several
colleagues, she’s keen to bring the perpetrator to justice so agrees to work
with them.

Inevitably, the innocent has her eyes opened, and she
discovers that the tactics and methods of Graver (actually a CIA officer) and
his partner, the mysterious Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro), leave a lot
to be desired, most of it being highly illegal. They make an incursion into
Mexico, extracting one of cartel boss Manual Díaz’s (Bernardo P Saracino)
lieutenants, during the course of which a sterling freeway shootout takes
place. As her association with the team continues, she is continually
undermined in her attempts to pursue legitimate means of bringing Diaz to
justice, including prosecuting him for money laundering and being subjected to
an attack by a dirty cop Ted (Jon Bernthal), during which Alejandro intervenes only
at the last moment.

The team’s main goal is to set up a situation whereby Díaz
reports back to “ghost” drug lord Fausto Alarcón (Julio Cedillo) so they can take
him out, and this is where the picture begins to go awry for me. Ostensibly, it
appears that the raid on the border tunnel used for drug smuggling is a
distraction enabling Alejandro to get across and follow Díaz to
his boss (presumably it also provides the CIA with alibi of conducting a
legitimate operation), but if so it’s an astonishingly thin plan.

The CIA is
going to rely on just one man to go in and assassinate the drug lord? A man for
whom circumstances blissfully collide, such that he hitches a ride with the
corrupt cop known to Díaz? Added to which, the CIA appears to be following Díaz
anyway, via the new Hollywood all-purpose plot device, a drone, since Alejandro
is getting constant feedback on Alarcon’s estate and defences. So did they need
Alejandro to make like one-man army at all? I’m sure Sheridan has explanations
for these points, but I doubt it will really make them any easier to swallow.

Essentially, this is where the picture drifts from
suspension of disbelief into outright contrivance. It wouldn’t have looked so
out of place for del Toro to have been straight swapped with Steven Seagal at
the point where Alejandro rocks up and shoots all the bad guys. Except for
killing the wife and kids, of course, as Seagal would never go that far; I
guess we’re supposed to think this gives the Alejandro a veneer of the
grounding and believability (much the same as de rigueur scenes of
waterboarding and the cynicism with regards to the activities of ostensibly
governmental institutions), but it does nothing of the sort.

The unlikeliness is compounded when we learn Alejandro’s
background; he’s not CIA, he’s working for the rival Colombian Medellin Cartel,
but even this is a means to an end. He’s out for revenge against Alarcón,
who had his wife decapitated and his daughter dumped in an acid bath. Before
all this, Alejandro was just a prosecutor in Juárez (now he is the Sicario – the hitman – of the title). Er, okay. So this
is revealed as the tale of a lawyer who becomes a kick-ass ninja in order to wreak
vengeance on those who finished his family. Suddenly Sicario’s gritty trappings fall around its ears with the revelation
that Alejandro is Batman (I’ve seen it suggested that “prosecutor” is a
reference to Alejandro’s method of killing, which is just plain silly, although
I guess we’ll find out in the sequel, focussing on this vigilante for justice).

Having thoroughly undermined the character and the bedrock
of the picture, there are still some decent scenes and moments to be had. Alejandro
holding a gun under Kate’s chin, forcing her to sign the report legitimising
the CIA operation (the only reasons she was invited along) has a certain
potency. And there’s little need to convince the audience that the CIA would be
willing to engage in re-introducing a status quo, fostering the continuing
drugs trade through a reliable source (the Colombians) rather than one that is
out of control; one might argue this is a much too charitable depiction of
their essential orruptibility, and that they are really up to their armpits in
coke, complicit with its cultivation and supply at every turn in the aid of
black budgets (the recently explored subject matter of Kill the Messenger).

Which hastens a further question; if the CIA is so willing
to circumvent and ignore every rule in the book to achieve their ends, why
would they solicit the company of a straight-shooter like Kate (in the initial
conversation, they reject her partner Reggie, The Fades' Daniel Kaluuya, for similar
reasons). Do they really want to be encountering such problems every time they
organise an illicit operation? They’d spend all their time threatening
reluctant collaborators. Wouldn’t it be common-sense to either forge the whole
thing/keep it off the official record or get someone in who is reliable and
malleable, a tried and trusted FBI yes-person? Sure, the Sicario route makes for a dramatic charge, but it undermines the
picture’s gritty posturing.

There are other points where the contrivance should have
been a warning sign of the gaps in logic to come; Reggie’s best pal, whom
Reggie is secretly setting Kate up on a date with, just happens to be a dirty
cop out to get the skinny on what she knows on behalf of the cartel? No wonder the
scene has caused confusion. It’s not a case of a densely layered picture requiring
a repeat visit to glean all its riches; Sicario’s
a muddle.

And yet, despite this, there’s a lot to like in the picture.
Blunt may look a little willowy and un-SWAT like, but that works in the favour
of the antagonistic, testosterone-charged milieu into which she is thrust. I
rather liked that, for a change, the protagonist (well, until you find the
makers are more interested in Alejandro) is out of her depth, and doesn’t get
to indulge gun-totting justice at every opportunity, even if it beggars belief
that someone in her line of work wouldn’t have eyes wide open to the ways and
means of other agencies, even if she has no truck with dodgy dealings herself.

Villeneuve’s direction is outstanding. I completely see why
he’s been engaged for Blade Runner 2;
he and Roger Deakins will certainly ensure it looks fantastic. More worrying,
though, is his aforementioned cluelessness with regards to scripts. If his
English language track record is any indication, Rick Deckard’s return could be
something of a train wreck (which, to be fair, I think most people are
expecting anyway).

First rate set pieces litter the picture, including the raid
on the house (although, even I know – from watching movies – that Kate is
rubbish at clearing rooms) the gun battle on the freeway, Kate’s altercation
with Ted, the night vision tunnel incursion, and – despite intruding from a
completely different movie, or at least different to the one I thought this was
– Alejandro’s assault on Alarcón’s residence. Roger Deakins’ cinematography
is every bit as impressive as you’d expect, while Johann Johannsson’s rumbly,
oppressive score adds enormously to the mood (I wouldn’t be surprised if he has
another Oscar nomination coming his way, although this is hardly the sort of
thing you’d sit down and savour with a glass of wine and a good book).

Sicario isn’t
nearly as stark, rigorous and uncompromising as you might have been led to
expect, so it’s just like Prisoners in
that respect. The action is as enervating and slick as in your typical action
movie, while it’s characters and situations are as melodramatic they come.
Nevertheless, Villeneuve fully succeeds in lending the picture a pervasively
oppressive atmosphere (as he did with Enemy),
underpinned by a barren, foreboding landscape. If you approach Sicario as an engaging thriller with
about as much insight into the world of cartels as Point Break has into bank robberies, you probably won’t come away
too disappointed.

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